Forget about engagement, think inboxing

While answering a question about how to improve IP reputation at Gmail I realized that I no longer treat Gmail opens as anything about how a user is interacting with email. There are so many cases and ways that a pixel load can be triggered, without the user actually caring about the mail that it’s not a measure of the user at all.

image of a head with gears and ideas floating around it

That doesn’t mean opens are useless. In fact, they’re very useful. But only if you have the full picture.

  1. Gmail, and other consumer mailbox providers, do not allow images to load for messages in the bulk folder.
  2. Gmail, and other consumer mailbox providers, do some level of individualised delivery. Even if most of a particular mailing is going to the bulk folder, individual users may still get that email in their inbox.
  3. Every message delivered to the spam folder, whether marked as spam by the user or delivered there by the mailbox provider, hurts your reputation.

One of the ways to improve reputation is to remove anything that is hurting your reputation. This means, removing any emails going to the bulk folder. How do we know which emails are going to the bulk folder? One piece of data is an image was loaded, i.e. an open was recorded. That open won’t happen if mail is in bulk.

How far back we go to remove addresses is an interesting question. I can argue all sorts of timelines. it doesn’t really matter. I’ve seen reputation improvement using just a few thousand emails that we knew were going to the inbox.

The real signal is not that you perfectly remove every address receiving mail in the bulk folder, but that you remove the majority of addresses receiving mail in the bulk folder. Want to go back a year? Sure. 18 months? yeah, probably will work. Longer, well, what’s the likelihood those addresses have been abandoned and no longer have an active user logging in and looking at data?

Once reputation is repaired, you can start to mail some of the suspended folks on your lists. But, stopping mail that is actively hurting your reputation is always the first step. Think about it, if you could remove spamtraps from your lists, wouldn’t you? Mail going to the spam folder can damage your delivery just as much as spamtraps.

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Engagement, Engagement, Engagement

I saw a headline today:
New Research from Return Path Shows Strong Correlation Between Subscriber Engagement and Spam Placement
I have to admit, my first reaction was “Uh, Yeah.” But then I realized that there are some email marketers who do not believe engagement is important for email deliverability. This is exactly the report they need to read. It lays out the factors that ISPs look at to determine if email is wanted by the users. Senders have to deal with vague metrics like opens and clicks, but the ISPs have access to user behavior. ISPs can see if mail is replied to, or forwarded or deleted without reading. They monitor if a user hits “this-is-spam” or moves the message to their junk folder. All of these things are signals about what the users want and don’t want.
Still, there are the folks who will continue to deny engagement is a factor in deliverability. Most of the folks in this group profit based on the number of emails sent. Therefore, any message about decreasing sends hurts their bottom line. These engagement deniers have set out to discredit anyone who suggests that targeting, segmentation or engagement provide for better email delivery and getting emails to the inbox.
There’s another group of deniers who may or may not believe engagement is the key to the inbox, but they don’t care. They have said they will happily suffer with lower inbox delivery if it means they can send more mail. They don’t necessarily want to discredit deliverability, but they really don’t like that deliverability can stop them from sending.
Whether or not you want to believe engagement is a critical factor in reaching your subscribers, it is. Saying it’s not doesn’t change the facts.
There are three things important in deliverability: engagement, engagement, engagement.

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From the archives: Taking Permission

From February 2010, Taking Permission.

Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us.
Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us permission.”
In many cases, though, the permission isn’t given to the sender, permission is taken from the recipient.
Yes, permission is being TAKEN by the sender. At the point of address collection many senders set the default to be the recipient gets mail. These processes take any notion of giving permission out of the equation. The recipient doesn’t have to give permission, permission is assumed.
This isn’t real permission. No process that requires the user to take action to stop themselves from being opted in is real permission. A default state of yes takes the actual opt-in step away from the recipient.
Permission just isn’t about saying “well, we told the user if they gave us an email address we’d send them mail and they gave us an email address anyway.” Permission is about giving the recipients a choice in what they want to receive. All too often senders take permission from recipients instead of asking for permission to be given.
Since that post was originally written, some things have changed.
CASL has come into effect. CASL prevents marketers from taking permission as egregiously as what prompted this post. Under CASL, pre-checked opt-in boxes do not count as explicit permission. The law does have a category of implicit permission, which consists of an active consumer / vendor relationship. This implicit permission is limited in scope and senders have to stop mailing 2 years after the last activity.
The other change is in Gmail filters. Whatever they’re doing these days seems to really pick out mail that doesn’t have great permission. Business models that would work a few years ago are now struggling to get to the inbox at Gmail. Many of these are non-relationship emails – one off confirmations, tickets, receipts. There isn’t much of a relationship between the sender and the recipient, so the filters are biased against the mail.
Permission is still key, but these days I’m not sure even informed permission is enough.

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Delivery and engagement

Tomorrow is the webinar Mythbusters: Deliverability vs. Engagement. This webinar brings together the ISP speakers from EEC15, plus Matt from Comcast, to expand on their comments. There’s been some confusion about the impact of engagement on delivery and whether or not senders should care about recipient engagement.
My opinion on the matter is well known: recipient engagement drives delivery to the inbox at some providers. I expect tomorrow we’ll hear a couple things from the ISPs.

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